Extending the dotnet core cli: introducing dotnet-prop

Last week, on the last day of the MVP Summit, I participated in the .NET Hackathon. There were many different topics, ranging from ASP.NET Core to Minecraft and HoloLens. But I was interested in better understanding the .NET Core tooling so I joined the table of the dotnet-cli team.

With the move from the easily editable project.json file to the old .csproj format, it became more difficult to manually edit the project file, so I built a command for the dotnet cli, to make it easier to edit some properties without messing up with the XML-based format of the MSBuild file.

The usage of the tool is very simple. First you have to add the tool to the project you want to edit by manually editing the csproj file. I know this sounds a bit weird but unfortunately there is no way to add global tools for the dotnet-cli, but only tools specific for a project. I sent a pull request to the dotnet-cli project so this step won’t be needed if they include this tool as command.